But the point is that every year hundreds of songs won’t become hits, and it will have very little to do with the fact that they weren’t “catchy enough.”

Indeed, many of us suffer from ideological “burn-in”—the unfortunate imprinting of biases from stories and exposure.

This way of predicting tastes by aggregating millions of people’s preferences is known as “collaborative filtering”—collaborative because it takes many users’ inputs, and filtering because it uses the data to narrow down the next thing you want to hear.

A book that sells one million copies in a year in the United States is a runaway bestseller—that 99 percent of the country didn’t buy. If ten million U.S. households watch a new show, it’s a smash hit—that 90 percent of households never saw. If fifty million people buy a ticket to see a film, it’s the year’s biggest blockbuster—which more than 80 p

In just the past thirty years, the number of books published worldwide has sextupled, exceeding three million new titles annually. The number of original scripted television shows and movies has similarly grown by a factor of six since the 1980s in the United States alone. You may add to that teetering pile of unread books, unwatched films, and unf

“Every bit of consumer research we’ve ever done shows only one consistent thing: Radio is the number one driver of sales and the biggest predictor of a song’s success,” says Dave Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen, which tracks music sales and airplay. “You almost invariably see the biggest songs hit radio first, then pick up [in

This might be the most important question for every creator and maker in the world: How do you make something new, if most people just like what they know? Is it possible to surprise with familiarity?

That’s why Simonson and Rosen have named their theory “absolute value.” The Internet, they say, will be a brand-assassinating technology, flooding the world with information and drowning out the signal of advertising for many products.

Audiences like art that gives them the jolt of meaning that often comes from an inkling of recognition.